1. You don’t need to know what you want to express, how to express it or how it will pay off before you begin to make art. You just need to start somewhere.

2. Prepare to make lot of disappointing, frustrating and confusing art for a while. Bad art is a crucial prerequisite for good art.

3. Don’t wait to have a whole idea. Half an idea or even the slightest hint of an idea is a good enough place to start working.

4. Play and experimentation without a particular goal in mind is fun, an important of the process, and will teach you things.

5. Find at least one thing to worship. What you contemplate, love and devote yourself to will give your art power.

HABITS

6. Organize your tools, kits and spaces as well as you are able. You don’t need anything fancy, but the more everything is ready and appealing, the more easily you can act on inspiration.

7. Control your inspiration diet. There is such a thing as too much, not enough, or the wrong exposure to art and other sources of inspiration.

8. Watch out for addictive behavior. What is draining your practice of time and energy? A satisfying art practice may help to meet your needs in healthier ways.

9. Intense experiences will inevitably derail your art making, but you can alchemize them into fuel for deeper artwork. Processing emotions through art-making is not only soothing, the art that comes from it can be surprisingly powerful.

10. When in doubt, do whatever you can to keep moving forward. Even if you don’t know exactly where something is heading, there’s probably 10% of it you can do that will benefit any of the possible outcomes. Doing this often points the way to the next 10% of the work.

IMPROVING

11. Try to notice when you’re working from the design toward the materials, or from the materials toward the design. Maybe you have a special piece of wood that you need to look at for a year before you know what it should be. Or, maybe you have a completed design in your mind just waiting for the right materials.

12. Limitations and rules can help bring focus and structure to both artist and art, creating beauty that wouldn’t exist without those restrictions. But don’t let a rule stand in between you and great art - art rules, especially, are made to be broken.

13. Mistakes are part of the process. Use them. Sometimes covering up an error creates more problems than just going with it. Similarly, don’t let a favorite part of the piece get in the way of a piece’s overall harmony. “Kill your babies.”

14. “Perfect is the enemy of good.” Better to make a good piece of art than to make nothing out of misplaced perfectionism. Alternately, if a piece is good and you think you can make it perfect, go for it. Attempting ambitious work is a crucial way to evolve your practice.

15. What if you had to make 100 copies of a piece? How would you do it? Or, if you started with one piece, how could you make 100 different iterations or variations of it?

BLOCKS

16. In art and in life, sometimes it helps to get the hardest thing out of the way first.

17. Feel like you’re hitting a wall? What is the wall like? Exactly how does it feel? You can make art about that.

18. Shake things up by starting a new piece, using a new media or trying a totally different type of expression. Do you usually paint? Try writing a short story or making a video.

19. On the other hand, the problem with your art might not be in your art. You might have to improve or fix something in your life before you can move forward artistically.

20. If you get out of your art practice entirely, you may have to do some difficult re-working, but it’s never too late to start again. No break from art has to be permanent, and you’ve probably learned some useful things in the time away.

☯️ FINISHING

21. Your most unique, important art is only going to make sense or sound like a good idea to other people once it’s finished.

22. Ultimately, 90% of art exists to be shared. Find something to do with it and, if possible, an appreciative and supportive audience.

23. It’s good to make money from your work if possible, but if all your art is aimed at making money it will never satisfy you. Keep making at least some art just for the love of it.

24. Learning when to stop and not over-work something is one of the hardest things. When in doubt, wait a day to work more on something that may be finished.

25. “What causes one person to fall asleep causes another to wake up.” Follow your intuition and do art the way that feels true.